Busy day

[catsittingstill]

Well, I got a slow start this morning, chortling over the comments on my last few entries, listening to the Birding By Ear CD (presently working on singsongers, robin, scarlet tanager and summer tanager) and generally puttering. Picked up the bird book, but it was too late in the morning to see much, came back inside feeling kind of bored and restless.

Then it occurred to me that there's a faculty lunch at Carson Newman (the college where my husband just started teaching) that I could go, and that while I was over there I could check out the library and the swimming pool. I don't need to sit around the house bored and lonely. Ha!

So I bought 30 pounds of tomatoes at the produce stand (open again--yay! Guilford wasn't sick these past few days, just fishing), left a note for Kip, who was away from his office, went to the gym and got the schedule for the swimming pool, checked out the periodicals at the library (they have Science, and Science News and Cell, but not Nature! How strange is that? But they do have several cool Tennessee-specific nature magazines), collected Kip, went to the lunch, discovered a friend of a friend was planning a road bike ride that afternoon and would I like to join?, hurried home, sliced 10 pounds of tomatoes and put them in the dryer, pumped up my bike's tires and shocks, went on about half the road bike ride, but had to turn back early so as to be in time to have dinner with a couple of friends of ours. Whew.

Gonna get out there, meet new people, make new friends and find fun things to do. Today was a good start. In the meantime, I'll have lots of dried tomatoes.

Comments

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

sliced 10 pounds of tomatoes and put them in the dryer

I realized almost immediately, both from context and from your previous posts, that you mean a *food* dryer. However, I've been doing laundry all day, and a food dryer is not the first image that presented itself on reading that sentence!

(Since I didn't actually post and say Hi! earlier, well, Hi! My name's Betsey; I've seen you at several filkcons, but not really to speak to. My husband, anach, is the one who asked you, at FKO, to check the chords he'd figured out for "Mark's Song" [for what orientation help that may be]. We're in the Chicago area. Welcome to the neighborhood! (Well, to the east-of-the-Mississippi neighborhood, anyway.))

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

(grin) yes, I realized after I wrote that how it might sound. But I use a clothesline (or clothesracks here in Tennessee so I can move them indoors on short notice). I think I've used an actual clothes dryer maybe twice in the past year. I'll probably get into why more deeply on some quiet day when I have nothing else interesting to talk about.

Hi Betsey--thanks for the welcome! I think I'm going to enjoy living here.

[ohiblather.livejournal.com]

What kind of dryer are you using? I've been seriously toying with the idea of buying one for several years now, especially motivated by food prep for canoe trips but also regular use. My problem is lack of space in our apartment, however.

Debbie

Dryer types

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I'm planning to rhapsodize on food dehydrators in a later post :-) but the short version is: I'm using an American Harvest Gardenmaster. It has 1 square food per tray (mine came with 8 trays but can be expanded to 30) and a 1 kilowatt heater (good thing--dries things fast, reducing loss of flavor and nutrients by exposure to heat / bad thing--uses more electricity; I feel periodically guilty about this) and came with all kinds of accessories (almost typed "excessories" :-) like little plates to make fruit leather on and screens that help keep the food from sticking to the trays. However it is pretty expensive--160$, I think.
As far as storage space goes, this model/configuration is roughly 18 inches in diameter and 18 inches tall; about a foot of the height is the 8 trays which could be removed and stashed in various places if you can't store it all of a piece. There's no denying it's fairly big; I keep mine on top of the clothes dryer (but this is mostly for proximity to a 3 prong electrical outlet--our house is not blessed with a multitude of these.

The local Wal-Mart has a Snackmaster (by the same company, but a budget version) 0.8 square food per tray comes with 4 trays; don't remember the heater wattage, fewer accessories, for about 40$.

There are also other types of food dehydrators; many of them have a square or rectangular footprint which might fit into your storage space more efficiently. Some of them have stackable trays like the American Harvest models, some have insertable trays and would have to be stored all of a piece.

Making camping food was high on my list too, so I looked for a model that had several temperature settings, since cooked meat and jerkey have to be dried at higher temperatures than vegetables to reduce the risk of spoiling.

Hope this helps! Cat

Re: Dryer types

[maedbh7.livejournal.com]

Actually, this is very helpful information for me, as I'm looking to make jerky at home, and had no idea it required a higher temperature than vegetables. Thanks :) -H...

Re: Dryer types

[ohiblather.livejournal.com]

SO envious. I'd love to see your set-up sometime.

The Snackmaster sounds more space-conscious, but even that wouldn't fit in our small kitchen right now, sadly. One reason we were house hunting was to get more kitchen space! You've inspired me to start checking out the smaller models, though. Surely there must be others like me with very limited space.

Thanks so much,

Debbie

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

You may wish to contact the Tennessee Ornithological Society for guides to TN birds. There's a short on-line bibliography of reference materials on Tennessee birds (which inclues a Southeast land-resource book written by someone from the Nature Conservancy). In some ways, I wish my daughter had gotten into birding when we were in Tennessee, but she was still a wee one then (and horses were king, at least to her).

You may wish to ask your spouse if Carson Newman's library resources include electronic access to Nature. Or if you can get courtesy access to UTK's library. (I forget exactly how far Jefferson City is from Knoxville.)

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestions; I'll check them out when I have time :-)

And it may be that Carson Newman gets Nature but doesn't choose to display it for some reason; they have signs up saying that they don't have space to display all the current periodicals and to check the catalog for library holdings. I was cruising through in a hurry and didn't bother.

Birding is cool. I think I didn't appreciate them as a child because I saw birds all the time so I never really looked at them. I watched the hummingbird feeder while I was washing and slicing tomatoes yesterday and saw at least two hummingbirds feuding over who was allowed to drink there. They're fearless!